The compass – with plaster, pieces of colored glass, some plaster and hundreds of working hours, the members of the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque are busy restoring the distinctive stained glass windows of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The Islamic Endowment Department in occupied Jerusalem says that these windows were damaged during recent clashes in the mosque’s courtyards between worshipers and the Israeli occupation police forces.

It takes up to six months to make a single window, from sculpting the plaster, installing the stained glass pieces, and fixing the glass in place with plaster paste.

And the windows of Al-Aqsa are a witness that tells a story of Islamic architecture, with its artistic panels, in front of which the feet of meditators are stuck in the Qur’anic verses, prophetic hadiths, exquisite drawings, and precise geometric shapes.

Director of the Reconstruction Committee Bassam Hallaq said, “Al-Aqsa Mosque has windows and stucco windows, and they are known to be interwoven with stucco and colored pieces of glass. It is made manually only in the reconstruction workshop by Palestinian technicians, and the work in each window takes about six months.”

He added that the internal stucco windows consist of decorations of plant shapes or fish scales, while the external stucco windows are geometric shapes and most of them are circles.

The 56 windows of the door open to sunlight from the moment their disk turns at sunrise to sunset, to paint in the interior images of the transparent shadows of the decorations that form these windows.

The windows of the al-Qibli prayer hall, whose wall is about a meter thick, are designed on two sides, one exterior designed with geometric shapes of stucco stained clear glass, and the interior is decorated with colored glass with pictures of plants and geometric drawings.

Hallaq explained the reason for the damage and shattering of some windows, saying, “The Israeli occupation authorities broke windows after they climbed onto the roof of the mosque so that they could throw smoke bombs and tear gas at worshipers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Pointing to windows that had been restored, Alaa al-Muhtaseb of the Al-Aqsa Reconstruction Committee said, “Most of these windows have been restored with plaster and glass, in addition to painting the wood green.”

Reuters